Pride in Craft 2025: This Way Forward

The practices of the following seven artists were chosen to be featured in Pride in Craft 2025 for the resonant way they clearly move through and around the muddied noise of discourse on transgender and queer life. These artists are building unignorable bodies of work, ballasted with the weight of a sense of familiarity, instead of carving out of life and finding a way to fit aesthetics within a predetermined cavity. In their forms and compositions, their works become beacons to other trans and queer people. Ceramic sculptures by Jaxx Bonnamie, Kaitlyn Brennan, Miles Clarke, and Julian Miholics are recognizable to a viewer as token snapshots from various stages of life. The glass works of Levi DeCoste and Jorie Doucette embody a heightened awareness in an othered body that rises from moving through a medical system, while DeCoste’s textile works are catalyzed by trans ecologies, grown from research using historical queer semiotics as touch stones.

'Reflecting on AIDS After Living Through COVID' by Bill Stearman

The use of symbols and ephemeral items draw a clear thread between DeCoste’s and Bill Stearman’s bodies of textile work. Stearman, a mid-seventies Queer quilt maker and activist, is committed to using quilts as a medium to record symbols gay life and the progression of legal rights for queers in Canada (from the 1950's to present). 

Stearman began making quilts in 2014 as a temporary way to manage inner turmoil through repetitive practice with a tactile material. Quilt making quickly became an expanded way to reflect on the larger systems surrounding him and to be used as a medium for storytelling. The messaging rooted in Stearman’s quilts is meant to enrich and guide future generations of queer people by reflecting the past. He illustrates queer life through layers of codes, like in ‘A Gay Bedspread’, pictured to the left, where a spectrum of coloured quilt tiles fall over the cover in a wave. Each colourway of stripes makes up a word in Braille, spelling out: 
t*w*o
f*@*g*g*@*t*s
s*l*e*e*p
h*e*r*e

Collaged of functioning pockets and reclaimed denim, Stearman’s 2023 quilt ‘1971: Before We Could Ask’ is a display of queer culture born out of necessity and still used today. DeCoste’s use of handkerchiefs in ‘Transfigurations’ references hanky code while expanding the pieces’ ephemerality to transness through process and symbolism. They used collected, natural materials to dye textiles, and decorated the surfaces through screen printing and cyanotype. These textile pieces also reference functional common textiles such as curtains and religious shrouds, drawing to question the relationship to queerness within religion and to nature. 

Through project research, DeCoste has found a lack of historically documented trans semiotics and trans-inclusive ecologies. These gaps in reference material have been a catalyst for them to build works as an ongoing archive of their transition and queer life. They have solidified a syringe used to inject HRT into cast iron, and with the appearance of a salvaged item, this work has become an artefact forged from their time of struggling to access gender-affirming care. 

Also made during this time period by DeCoste is a stained glass pane titled ‘Partition'; soldered lines replicating a chain link fence, torn open at the center and looking out to a beckoning light over a field. Their use of this motif was born from “[thinking] about barriers - permeable and impermeable.” They share, “The ability to see through to the other side of the fence through the spaces in the chain link, yet the presence of a separating barrier felt fitting visually and metaphorically for my experience in finding a doctor who would prescribe HRT.” 

Through his flameworked glass sculpture, Jorie Doucette displays an abstract representation of the feeling of being studied and examined, and being seen as a specimen for being trans, fat, and having a chronic illness. An expression of body and gender dysmorphia, these blown glass jars hold amorphous glass forms suspended in pond water. In this incorporation of a natural element anchoring a piece coupled with representation of a trans body, Doucette’s work harkens to DeCoste’s studies of trans ecologies and trans peoples' integral place in the world. The properties of glass align with the feelings Doucette identifies with in terms of his sexuality and gender, “Glass and queerness are very similar, as we both can be very fluid and keep transforming into something new.” 

A sense of self formed by a feeling of otherness is explored in the figurative ceramic work by  jaxx bonnamie and Miles Clarke. Clarke’s ‘STING LIKE A BEE!’  earthenware sculpture of a boxer is a portrait of masculinity in response to (and aesthetic inflections given more weight from) the presence of a viewer and the pressure to perform gender.

The body of the boxer is braced for an impact which for Clarke is felt from feedback from cisheteronormative and non-Black spaces on how to move through the world as a Black Trans man. With an informed glance, the figure is fraught with tension and is caught between fight and flight. 

“I am acutely aware of how I am perceived—my masculinity, my Blackness, and the assumptions that come with both. It’s a kind of hyperawareness that sharpens the way I observe, move, and create. In my craft practice, this translates into a deep consideration of who has access, who feels invited, and who is left out.”

The narrative posture of the boxer shows how stereotypes and prejudices are historic forces that push a body into moving a particular way in defence.  Clarke describes this display of masculinity as “strength as both armor and burden, visibility as both validation and risk.”

Coiled and slab built, illustrative characters by Bonnamie have their expressions carved into their surfaces through sgraffito, this surface design technique covers their bodies with bold patterns, suggesting makeup, hair, edges of clothes, and permanently cast shadows. Facets of themself inform the figures, “They embody everything I ever thought to be 'wrong' with me in a way that highlights and celebrates their wrongness.” 

'Ladylike', 'Cry on my Own', 'Tale Spinner I' by Jaxx Bonnamie

He elaborates,  “Before I had words to ascribe to myself I felt alien in the world. Existing a realm just removed from everyone else trying desperately to reach out and doomed to never be heard. Years later I learned I wasn’t crazy or flawed or wrong. I am queer. I am trans. I am autistic. My sense of self changed drastically just learning I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. My work explores the dehumanizing way I am expected to expose every corner of myself to justify my existence. My work celebrates the creature.” Bonnamie’s characters display an expanse of gender expression that verges on the mythical; horns curl naturally from their foreheads, noses mimic that of a doe’s, and ears slope into extended points. 

In a similar vein of visual mythical folklore, Julian Miholic’s ‘Goat’ is poses peacefully and innocently while delivering a succinct message across their back in support of the perseverance and progression of trans life. Goats have been a representation of traits despised by Christian-majority countries for centuries, who also happen to falsely perceive some of the same traits in trans and queer people - a true political scapegoat. 

Miholics took inspiration from the reclaimed tale of Baphomet for this sculpture, “Baphomet makes a neat encapsulation of traits despised by modern Christianized, heteronormative society; a hatred of the marginalized, the other, and the gender-ambiguous. In recent years, Baphomet and the goat have been reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community, both by emphasizing the original intent of the Sabbatic goat and by taking strength and pride from the traits they have been told to despise.”

In the sculpture ‘I Am Seen’, Miholics encourages those grappling with dysphoria and ideas of physical correctness to truly behold the beauty of the trans experience and decenter everything taught in opposition to this. As the ceramic wolf shows its teeth, the stunning beast also shows off a new way of seeing the world, an adaptation as a necessity for survival in this way, with eyes planted at the back of the tongue. 

Kaitlyn Brennan illustrates the surfaces of her functional pottery with images and symbols imbued with playful innuendo, displaying subtle queer and lesbian specific stereotypes. Frequently using lavender, violets, pansies, carabiners, and beavers in her illustrations, Brennan creates work that acts as a wink to other queers. This covert way of queer coding a work of functional craft is a humorous way of moving more queerness into plain sight…proving the notion that we could be - and are - everywhere. 

Untitled beaver plate and lavender mug by Kaitlyn Brennan, earthenware, slip, underglaze, glaze, Thrown and altered. Electric fired to come 03.

Miholics also depicts illustrated narratives across traditional forms of ceramic “pillow” tiles in his triptych 'Your Embrace'. Tran animals are seen in the three tiles in pairs caressing, holding, reaching for each other. These fae-like monster characters are shown existing in a flora-filled world - an easy stretch for the imagination to the dreamed utopias of trans and queer people. 

Craft Ontario extends a thank you to these seven artists for sharing their practices with us to be featured for Pride in Craft 2025 and for speaking through their craft on the possible ways forward at this point in time for 2SLGTBQIA+ people. Wishing everyone a joyful and safe Pride!